The WELL: inkwell.vue.289: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2007

#104: Hal Royaltey (hal) Sun 14 Jan 07 16:13

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 16:13:00 PST

I'll add my thanks to <bumbaugh>s.

What a great start to the New Year. [Read entire topic]

#103: Christian De Leon-Horton (echodog) Sat 13 Jan 07 10:10

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 10:10:00 PST

<Open-source is commons. Commons is persistent and beloved, but it's not doing all that great.>

It's kicking our ass in Baghdad. If it works in war, I have a hard time understanding why it won't work in other endeavors as well. Perhaps it only works when a bunch of little people get pissed off and decide victory is more important than profit, I don't know. [Read entire topic]

#102: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Sat 13 Jan 07 07:36

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 07:36:00 PST

Here I go:

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about_bampfa/avantgarde.html

New Media and Social Memory

Jan. 18, 2007??The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is proud to present New Media & Social Memory, a public symposium to discuss strategies for preserving digital art at a time when digital technologies are evolving and becoming obsolete at an astonishingly rapid pace.

While focussing on digital art, the symposium will also address larger concerns about the long-term conservation of our increasingly digital culture, including how we decide what digital content - from Web sites to video games - are worth saving. The full day of presentations and panel discussions by leading experts in the field of digital preservation will be held in the museum theater on Thursday, Jan. 18. This symposium is open to the public free of charge; however, due to limited space, online registration is required.

Symposium Program??10:00-10:15?Introductions?Richard Rinehart, Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator, BAM/PFA?Jane Metcalfe, Founder & Original Publisher, Wired Magazine, BAM/PFA Board 10:15-11:00?Stewart Brand, President, Long Now Foundation 11:10-12:00?Stewart Brand, President, Long Now Foundation, in conversation with?Kevin Kelly, Editor at Large, Wired Magazine?Jon Ippolito, Assistant Professor of New Media, University of Maine 12:00-1:00?Lunch break 1:10-2:00?Alexander Rose, Executive Director, Long Now Foundation?Kurt Bollacker, Digital Research Director, Long Now Foundation 2:10-3:00?Marisa Olsen, Editor and Writer, Rhizome.org?Michael Katchen, Archivist, Franklin Furnace 3:10-4:00?Jeff Rothenberg, Computer Scientist?Richard Rinehart, Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator, BAM/PFA 4:10-5:00?Bruce Sterling, Author, Founder, Dead Media Project 5:00-7:00?Public reception??Contact: Richard Rinehart, rinehart@berkeley.edu. Archiving the Avant Garde: Documenting and Preserving Digital/Media Art is a consortium project of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Cleveland Performance Art Festival and Archive, Franklin Furnace Archive, and Rhizome.org, and is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. [Read entire topic]

#101: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Fri 12 Jan 07 14:07

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 14:07:00 PST

And what a light with which to begin 2007!

Thank you Jon and Bruce, and thanks to everyone who joined in this wandering, speculative, informed, enlightening, frightening, and uplifiting consideration of the state of things.

Safe travels, Bruce.

And, of course, we'll leave the doors open here for conversation to continue as long as the conversants conspire to make it so. [Read entire topic]

#100: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 12 Jan 07 12:11

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:11:00 PST

There's a very real economic issue here - reusability has impact on churn that puts bread on somebody's table. Similar issue with fossil fuels - if we could go 100% solar/electric tomorrow and eliminate our need for gasoline, we would trash a whole economy built around petroleum. A significant weakness within the environmental community is its failure to acknowledge and address the economic impact of proposed solutions. On the other hand, we suspect that there are significant business opportunities related to sustainability and energy efficiency.

So I would say that, if Greg was going to write a proposal to "introduce a federal program to produce, handle, and recycle a standardized set of multi-purpose containers," he would want to show the impact on exisiting business and, to extent it's a negative impact, how to mitigate the down side, no? And perhaps demonstrate any related opportunities for new business.

*** Slippage, as we say on the WELL (i.e. Bruce posted while I was writing the abover response). Bruce, I recall fiddling with those clamps at your house in Austin some time ago - I never could make 'em into anything cohesive. Congratulations!

Hopefully one of our hosts can summarize this discussion and figure out what we said about the state of the world. The news ain't great: more war, in fact a military *surge* that might accidentally leak into Iran, while old-fashioned Marxists are attacking the U.S. in Greece (!!!)... and bitter cold and ice are on the way, despite global warming.

Martin Luther King's birthday is Monday, and I just heard a news story about a scrap of paper he carried with him, where he'd written a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, and this is probably a good quote to wrap things up:

"...in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth, truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists." [Read entire topic]

#99: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 12 Jan 07 11:42

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 11:42:00 PST

*Wa-ha-ha! Best news I've had this year! Some lamps of mine have shown up here in Belgrade customs! The lamps I designed are actually physically existing and for sale! People are buying them!

http://www.annalena.fr

*If I can get them out of the hands of the puzzled shippers, I'll actually own some copies of my own designer lamp!

*This is a stereotypical story of design, ladies and gentlemen... even though these lamps are made of the CHEAPEST AND HUMBLEST INDUSTRIAL MATERIALS POSSIBLE, literal plastic cable clamps...

http://www.cableclamp.com/

...because they are hand-assembled in a tony Parisian atelier and sold through galleries, they are pricy art objets that will set you back a cool USD1,500! I wouldn't dream of buying such a thing. But, you know, people do.

*I don't think they plan to make many. It's too onerous. If, for some strange reason, you really need one, better move fast.

PS, yes, it is a fluorescent lamp with green credentials...

PPS. They come with French, not US wiring...

PPPS there may be a little trouble at Customs...

This is a fine high-note in which to cruise out of this State of The World discussion. I gotta pack. I'm heading for San Francisco. [Read entire topic]

#98: Berliner (captward) Fri 12 Jan 07 08:30

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 08:30:00 PST

Actually, the container thing is in limited use in Germany; when I have empty bottles, I can go to a machine at my supermarket and feed them through one by one and the readout says "Becks .5L" or "Volvic PET" or whatever, not because that was what was in the actual bottles I'm returning, but because that's the form factor, after which I press a button and get a credit receipt out. But it not only does beer and water bottles, but various sizes of yoghurt jars and so on. [Read entire topic]

#97: Gregory Naughton (bumbaugh) Fri 12 Jan 07 07:28

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 07:28:00 PST

Grogry writes:

(Er, Gregory writes:)

To go along with the post from Shebar Windstone,

I had this idea sometime ago which strikes me as still a good one which would be to in some measure introduce a federal program to produce, handle, and recycle a standardized set of multi-purpose containers. These would accommodate a wide range of conceivable shapes and sizes -- especially for soft-drinks, water bottles, glass jars, etc.

It seems that there is a good deal of overlap with most products in the grocery store where the containers could be generalized, categorized and manufactured according to strict specifications. How this would work is that say, you package your applesauce in a glass jar of type B13, so B13 has a set lid and glass jar. Ragu also uses B13 for Spaghetti sauce, etc.. Now that we know everything about B13, its size, measurement, lid-fitting, etc, then instead of having to melt the jars down and re-create them after each usage, we merely need to collect them and powerwash them suckers and then out the door they go, shipped off to whoever the next guy in line is who needs a palette of B13 jars, back through the cycle again. You do this for as long as you can until they become too damaged.

It seems that federalizing of something so low-level and so simple, but so essential to daily life would eliminate a good deal of energy waste and reduce landfill size, etc..

How do you get companies to bother to use these jars? A tax credit or incentive probably. They wouldn't be for everybody, but it would make your company look cool if you used them. I think it would work, I just never knew who to tell it to.

This bottle deal seems to suggest a larger metaphor for instantiating federal programs to take over some of the trivial aspects of every day existence that aren't critical to expression or vanity but are entirely necessary and do so with an eye to smart design, re-usability and clever frugality. The solution(s) to global warming no doubt consist of lots and lots of small hacks that add up, smarter ways to do the same old thing. the trick is just recognizing what those are.

I suppose that this presupposes an intelligent enough electorate?

Sincerely, Greg Naughton [Read entire topic]

#96: Cupido, Ergo Denego (robertflink) Fri 12 Jan 07 06:52

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 06:52:00 PST

>Even though we're users of English here and obviously moral actors in that process, we can't take that entirely to heart and declare that it's all our own fault or virtue.<

It may be that the praise and blame game is testimony to an underlying belief that some form of agency makes the world happen. I think that the question "why?" has such implications, suggestion a "will" behind phenomena. "How?" is a more modest, neutral question that points us to understanding the determining factors and to staying relatively free of placing praise or blame. (We also miss the fun, of course.)

In this vein, praise and blame can be seen as evidence of belief in miracles even when it they (praise and blame) are offered by a nominal atheist. [Read entire topic]

#95: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 12 Jan 07 01:31

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 01:31:00 PST

I'm totally into dreaming impossible dreams. Got no problem with that. It's a business model, even. The problem comes with dreaming impossible dreams, discovering that they don't match the objective state of the actual world, and declaring that the world is therefor mediocre.

If the world had been created to match up to our ideals, there would never have been such a thing as, say, quantum physics. That just flat-out wasn't dreamt of in our philosophy. Quarks. What is all THAT about? Is THAT supposed to make this the best of all possible worlds? Strangeness, charm, up, down. As far as we can figure, that's how the world actually *works.* Are we supposed to be optimistic or pessimistic about it?

"Wow, man, quarks. I'm so upbeat and affirmative about those!"

"No, no, this sorry world has far too many random quantum fluctuations. Schrodinger's cat was doomed from the beginning!"

Are quarks mediocre? Should we fight them as an unbeatable foe? Should we hold our breath until they go away? Or celebrate them in the streets? It seems to me that the proper attitude toward phenomena like quarks isn't pragmatism or idealism or pessimism or optimism or any -ism at all, really. It ought to be a sense of engagement. Of wonderment. That's a pretty tepid attitude compared to declaring a bold crusade against quarks, but you learn more that way.

As a futurist, I've come to feel that optimism and pessimism are serious intellectual vices. They truly cripple your ability to come to grips with likely courses of development. You can't properly entertain just-upside scenarios or just-downside scenarios. That's like wearing a blinder over one eye.

I myself tend to be a rather acerbic, dismissive, Mencken-like figure, but that's just a matter of my personal temperament. That's not the way the world actually functions. Politics doesn't exist in order to give me sardonic chuckles; I mean, yeah, I get a hell of a lot of them, but that's not what politics is actually trying to do.

To do serious futurism you need to think historically. The future is a kind of history that hasn't happened yet. If someone asked if you were optimistic or pessimistic about the 19th century, that question would have no meaning. If you wrote a book about the 19th century and you said it was the worst of all possible centuries and that only glum, terrible, and degrading things happened then, you'd be clearly fraudulent. You wouldn't be considered a great historian; it'd be obvious to everybody that you had some kind of bee in your bonnet.

When it comes to future events rather than past ones, we should try for an even-tempered historical judgment. It's more important to seek an understanding of the determining factors than it is to hasten to praise or blame.

Many of those factors, the driving forces that shape tomorrow, are very, very old. Like, say, the spread of the English language. English was spreading long before we were born and will continue to spread long after we're dead. Even though we're users of English here and obviously moral actors in that process, we can't take that entirely to heart and declare that it's all our own fault or virtue. The spread of English has good aspects and it has bad aspects, but our ability to do anything about that in our frail mortal lifetimes is limited. It's a vast historical process. It doesn't exist to please us or displease us. It's not our friend or our enemy. It was what is was, it is what it is, and it will be whatever it will be. [Read entire topic]